Meeting Roadmap
A Guide to the Spring 2017 Coalition for Networked Information
Membership Meeting


The Spring 2017 CNI Membership Meeting, to be held at the Hyatt Regency
Hotel in Albuquerque, New Mexico on April 3 and 4, offers a wide range
of presentations that advance and report on CNI's programs, showcase
projects underway at CNI member institutions, and highlight important
national and international developments. Here is the customary
"roadmap" to the sessions at the meeting, which includes both plenary
events and an extensive series of breakout sessions focusing on current
developments in networked information.

As usual, the CNI meeting proper is preceded by an optional orientation
session for new attendees—both representatives of new member
organizations and new representatives or alternate delegates from
existing member organizations—at 11:30 AM; guests are also welcome.
Refreshments are available for all at 12:15 PM on Monday, April 3. The
opening plenary is at 1:15 PM and will be followed by three rounds of
parallel breakout sessions. Tuesday, April 4, includes additional
rounds of parallel breakout sessions, lunch, and the closing keynote,
concluding around 3:30 PM. Along with plenary and breakout sessions,
the meeting includes generous break time for informal networking with
colleagues and a reception which will run until 7:15 PM on the evening
of Monday, April 3, after which participants can enjoy an evening in
Albuquerque.
 
The CNI meeting agenda is subject to last minute changes, particularly
in the breakout sessions, and you can find the most current information
on our website, www.cni.org, and on the announcements board near the
registration desk at the meeting. Information about wireless access in
the meeting room areas will be available in your packets and at the
registration table. In addition, we will be running the mobile-friendly
web app Sched to facilitate online access to the meeting schedule;
Sched will be available from the meeting website, and information about
it will be emailed to registrants and available at the meeting
registration desk. And we’ll still have printed programs available for
all, of course.


The Plenary Sessions

We have two wonderful plenary sessions lined up. Both are tied very
closely to the ongoing programmatic interests of CNI and its members.

Our opening plenary speaker will be Alison Head, Executive Director and
Principal Investigator of Project Information Literacy (PIL). Currently
Alison is also a Research Affiliate at the metaLAB (at) Harvard and a
Visiting Scholar at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's University
Libraries.

Since 2008, PIL has been asking probing and perceptive questions about
how today’s college students are accessing and using information in
their studies, their everyday lives, and their first work experiences
after graduation. PIL employs a project team to gather data from
students in over 60 higher education institutions of all types and has
published nine open access research reports on their findings. The
analyses they produce have gained wide recognition for the insights
they provide into use of information by students and new graduates. For
example, a report published in 2016 concluded that new college
graduates believe that they have good competencies for evaluating
information, but that they were weak in their ability to formulate and
ask their own questions. This has implications for information
professionals and for higher education faculty in general. PIL has also
provided insights into students’ use of library space and library
space planning efforts. For their most recent student survey, Alison
and her team published an open access data set, code book, survey
instrument, and user guide along with the report of their study.

I think that Alison will give you a new perspective on today's
students. Also, the thing I love about Alison's work is that she asks
questions not just about how to help students succeed at being
students, but how to help students thrive in their lives after they
leave the academy; this is something that we don't think nearly enough
about.

I'm delighted that Amy Brand, the Director of the MIT Press, will be
giving the closing plenary at the meeting. Amy has had an extensive,
very diverse career in academia and scholarly communication, and thus
brings a wide perspective on roles and opportunities for university
presses within a very broad context. In addition, the MIT Libraries
last year released a bold new vision for their future role; the MIT
press will play an important part in this, so her comments are
particularly timely.

MIT Press is a thriving, dynamic and innovative leader of long standing
in the university press world, both in terms of what they publish and
how they approach the processes of publishing. Amy has told me she will
share some of her thinking about the future of the monograph, the role
of open access, the challenges of discovery and preservation in a
digital world, and much more.

You can find biographies of the speakers, and their abstracts, at
https://www.cni.org/mm/spring-2017/plenary-sessions-s17.

Highlighted Breakout Sessions

I will not attempt a comprehensive summary of breakout sessions here;
we offer a great wealth and diversity of material. However, I want to
note, particularly, some sessions that have strong connections to the
Coalition's 2016-2017 Program Plan and also other sessions of special
interest, and to provide some additional context for a few sessions
that may be helpful to attendees in making session choices. I do
realize that choosing among so many interesting concurrent sessions can
be frustrating, and as always we will try to put material from the
breakout sessions on our website following the meeting.

Our meeting will include the first rollout of the results from the new
Ithaka S+R US Library Survey 2016, presented by Roger Schonfeld. This
survey measures academic library deans and directors’ views on
strategies to support research, teaching, and learning and compares the
responses with the results of their Faculty Survey 2015, as well as
older survey data. The session will include opportunities for
discussion on the implications of the survey.

We will have sessions highlighting some hot topics in the policy arena.
Many researchers are concerned about the potential loss of access to
important data collected and curated by US federal agencies such as the
Environmental Protection Agency and have begun a project, in
conjunction with libraries, to develop a “data refuge;” we will hear
from some of the participants in this initiative. Krista Cox from the
Association of Research Libraries’ public policy initiative along with
Alan Inouye of the American Library Association’s Washington Office
will present a session Direct from the Swamp in which they’ll discuss
the latest implications of the new administration and Congress for
libraries and higher education. We will have a session on protecting
researcher privacy in the surveillance era and another on strategies
for assisting students in identifying fake news.

We will have a particularly strong emphasis at this meeting on the
topic of new strategies and approaches for institutional repositories
(IR) and institutional collections of digital objects. Prior to the
opening of the membership meeting, we will hold two rounds of a limited
attendance Executive Roundtable on the topic Rethinking Institutional
Repository Strategies. We had to turn away many institutions that
wished to participate due to space constraints and I will be providing
a summary of the roundtables in a project briefing session. After the
meeting, we will also produce the usual written report on the
roundtables.

In addition, you will find an array of approaches to the evolving
nature of repositories in these sessions:
• Representatives from Duke and the University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill will describe their different approaches to repositories
and their strategies for how they will evolve on their campuses.
• The University of Michigan will discuss successes and concerns with
their IR, now 10 years old, and their plans to merge their original IR
and their data services version on a new platform.
• The University of British Columbia will discuss how they chose not to
consolidate their repositories but to develop a better discovery and
delivery service for their repositories.
• The University of New Mexico and the University of Wyoming will
describe their efforts to build services on top of their IR software.
• A representative from bepress will discuss the ways in which some
institutions are integrating their repository into the core goals and
activities of their college or university.
• DSpace will provide their latest information on the next phase of
their user interface.
• We will have a discussion of the ongoing problem of sustaining open
source software, in this case focusing on repository software.

Many CNI member institutions are developing a range of capabilities and
organizational strategies related to research data management
(including strategies for dealing with big data and services addressing
data curation, data discovery, and the support for new scholarly
practices (e-research). We also have a number of sessions that will
focus on a variety of services for researchers. The University of
California, San Diego will describe how its use of SHARE allowed it to
streamline its capability to provide discoverability and access to data
sets created or hosted on campus but not housed in the library’s
repository.

Additional sessions on data and research services include:
• A panel from the University of Rhode Island describing how the
library became the umbrella entity for big data and data science at
their institution.
• A discussion of a new incentive infrastructure for the sharing of
data and other research outputs to change research culture and
practice.
• A study at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign of attitudes
and practices regarding data management and sharing of biomedical and
bioengineering researcher.
• An update from Tom Hickerson of the University of Calgary on their
initiative to identify new forms of support for multidisciplinary
research needs of their faculty.
• A program at the University of Oklahoma to offer Software Carpentry
workshops to faculty so that they can develop basic programming skills
and good software practices that will help them automate and track
their research processes.
• A session on the University of Waterloo’s bibliometrics and research
impact program.
• A combined session that will feature California Digital Library’s
program to make data count by promoting usage and impact tracking along
with the University of New Mexico and the University of Montana’s work
on comparing DSpace log and Google Analytics data in regards to
tracking use of items in institutional repositories. This kind of usage
data is very important, but surprisingly tricky to capture accurately
in practice.

A number of sessions will focus on researchers in the digital
humanities, including a report on the Ithaka S+R studies of scholarly
practices in history, art history and most recently (2017) religious
studies. The Chinese University of Hong Kong Library and the Claremont
University Consortium will discuss their digital scholarship centers
and services, focusing on humanities and other disciplines. The
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill will provide information on
training students to support digital scholarship in their libraries.
Representatives from Johns Hopkins and University College London will
give an update on their project developing a linked data approach for
humanities data. Other sessions will focus on developments in
infrastructure and curation for a variety of digital objects in the
humanities, including two sessions on the emerging challenges of 3-D
cultural objects—paleontological collections at the University of
Wyoming and artifacts and other complex data related to archaeological
work at several campuses of the University of California. Two sessions
from UCLA will explore the ongoing development of their digital
ephemera project, emphasizing global cultural heritage partnerships,
and a second initiative enabling the publication of online spectral
image datasets of medieval manuscripts with two layers of textual
materials (palimpsests).

Developing systems to manage faculty research are taking a variety of
forms, and a session on research information management (RIM) systems
will include speakers from OCLC Research, Duke University, and the
University of Arizona. A session by Crossref will examine how open
identifier and metadata infrastructures can help streamline increased
reporting requirements faced by academic researchers.

Several sessions will examine identity and identity management issues,
including Montana State University’s look at Semantic Web Identify in
relation to academic organizations and concepts, a session by Elsevier
following up on publisher efforts to improve authentication and
authorization, and an update on the Social Networks and Archival
Context (SNAC) project by the US National Archives and Daniel Pitti
from the University of Virginia, which is now moved into a large-scale
pilot phase.

We have a very strong set of sessions on various aspects of digital
preservation, a topic of great interest to our members. We’ll learn
about a new initiative supported by The Andrew Mellon Foundation and
the Digital Preservation Coalition to look at strategies for preserving
email. Herbert Van de Sompel and Martin Klein of Los Alamos National
Laboratory along with Michael Nelson of Old Dominion University will
describe their project to explore how scholarly artifacts outside of
the established publishing system can be archived.
Other sessions on digital preservation include:
• Preserving Digital Content at Scale, where presenters from
Northwestern, Penn State, University of Wisconsin, York University, and
the Digital Preservation Network (DPN) will describe data and metadata
migration challenges and strategies.
• Virtual Reality in the Trenches, which will describe the University
of Oklahoma’s strategies and development of best practices for data
curation of virtual reality and 3-D digital assets. This is a
significant problem that has received little examination.
• Developing Library Technology Infrastructure, which will combine
reports from the University of New Mexico and Libnova on their digital
preservation initiative along with Dartmouth’s work on curating XML
collections and digital archive storage.
• Digital Preservation in Production, which will provide an update on
DPN and DuraCloud Vault after its first operational year.
• Perma.cc: Ensuring the Integrity of the Digital Scholarly Record,
describing a system for archiving web pages, originally developed for
the legal community but now expanding into broader academic use.

A selection of project briefings addresses a variety of themes
regarding platforms, tools, and services. We’ll hear an update on
FOLIO, OLE, and the Open Library Federation. We’ll also learn about
the use of linked data for heritage science and related disciplines in
a session from Library of Congress. Jeffrey Spies of the Center for
Open Science will explore data integrity and what librarians and
archivists can learn from Bitcoin, BitTorrent, and Usenet.

We will have some sessions that describe new services, spaces, and new
ways of working with faculty and students. CNI’s Joan Lippincott will
co-present with Martin Halbert of the University of North Texas and Liz
Milewicz of Duke University in a session examining the opportunities
and challenges of new types of spaces in libraries, including
information/learning commons, digital scholarship centers, and
makerspaces. I am very pleased that Jenn Stringer of the University of
California, Berkeley will present the IMS Global’s draft of Learning
Data and Analytics Key Principles (strongly influenced by some
excellent work done at the University of California) and will solicit
reactions from the CNI audience; I believe that the ethics, governance,
and policies in this area are a massive issue that needs to be much
better understood. We’ll learn about an Ohio State University
partnership program, the Affordable Learning Exchange, in which the
library is involved in a series of faculty grants that have resulted in
saving students nearly $1 million. Rice University, a long-time leader
in open educational resources (OER), will update us on recent
developments and provide suggestions for successful programs at other
institutions. In another Rice University presentation, we will learn
about how they are using student fellows to research topics related to
library priorities. A session on advancing accessibility will feature
three initiatives advancing progress in that area. At the University of
Connecticut, the library is examining how they may participate in
creating new types of scholarly products, working closely with faculty
researchers. A session that promises to be thought provoking will
examine new types of conversational interfaces for information systems
in which the user may not be able to tell whether the entity with which
they are conversing is human or a web robot or bot.

Finally, MIT recently released its Task Force on the Future of
Libraries preliminary report, which envisions the library as a global
entity for a global university. CNI attendees are invited to learn more
and to become involved in a discussion about how to collaboratively
achieve new kinds of goals for libraries. This conversation will be a
nice complement to Amy Brand’s closing address.

A complete list of breakout session abstracts will be added soon on the
CNI website. In many cases you will find these descriptions include
pointers to web resources that you may find useful to explore prior to
the session, and after the meeting we will add materials from the
actual presentations as they are available to us. We will be recording
the plenary sessions and a few breakout sessions and capture some
additional ones using voice over visuals. All these videos will be made
available in the weeks following the meeting. There will be a list of
the breakouts we plan to capture at the registration table, but please
keep in mind that these session captures do not include the discussion
part of the breakout, and that we occasionally have problems with the
captures. There’s no substitute for being there in person!

You can follow the meeting on Twitter by using the hashtag #cni17s.

I look forward to seeing you in Albuquerque, a new venue for the CNI
meeting. Please contact me (cliff@cni.org) or Joan Lippincott, CNI's
Associate Director (joan@cni.org), if we can provide you with any
additional information on the meeting.

Clifford Lynch
Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information